Twitch and Xbox One’s Strategic Partnership

One of the big announcements from our Xbox Briefing today at E3 was a strategic partnership with Twitch, the rapidly growing, leading video platform for gamers. Twitch has more than 35 million visitors per month and these gamers are connected from around the world to broadcast, watch, and chat from everywhere they play.

In today’s announcement, Xbox Chief Product Officer Marc Whitten, showcased how Twitch will be a built-in experience into Xbox One, so you can instantly broadcast your gameplay* as well as view and interact with other live gaming broadcasts. Twitch on Xbox One also offers the ability to discover tailored, relevant, and inherently social video content that spans everything from e-sports events to user generated original shows and game walk-throughs.

Our own Major Nelson had a chat with Emmett Shear, CEO of Twitch, about the partnership. Read on for more information about the partnership, what Twitch offers gamers, and Shears’ favorite games. And read the full interview on Major Nelson.

Major Nelson (MN): What does Xbox One integration of Twitch mean for the future of live broadcasting?

Shear: This is our chance to break into the console space in a big way. To date, PC games have been the biggest things on Twitch, mostly because it's incredibly difficult to broadcast console games today. The Xbox One integration means that Twitch users are going to be able to broadcast their console experiences even more easily than they can broadcast from PC. Live broadcasting your game is going to be for everyone in the future, not just people who can afford a capture card.

MN: What excites you most about coming to the Xbox platform, specifically Xbox One?

Shear: The Xbox One platform combines the best parts of console gaming with the best parts of PC gaming. Dedicated hardware for high level performance, combined with multitasking to run broadcasting and chat at the same time. The platform melds gaming with other activities in a way that we've never seen before. There's no way we could have accomplished what we're doing with the Xbox One on any other platform.

MN: What’s your favorite game to play?

Shear: I love all kinds of games. I'm kind of a game omnivore. Most recently I've actually been playing a lot of board games and card games. Magic: The Gathering, Small World, Coup. On the computer, usually Heart of the Swarm. My all-time most played game is almost certainly StarCraft: Broodwar. Close second to Super Smash Brothers.

MN: What has changed to make video games so popular among spectators?

Shear: Put simply: it's now possible. Internet connections are fast enough and video encoding is widespread enough that it's possible to create this content. Live video is a lot more bandwidth intensive than clip-based video, so it makes sense that it's taking off later.